Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2003 16:27:26 -0700 (PDT)
From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall <jhall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: U.S. Increasingly Using Patriot Act to Pursue Drugs, Swindling
To: Declan McCullagh <declan@xxxxxxxx>, Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Pertinent quote:
"[T]he ability to secure nationwide warrants to obtain e-mail and
electronic evidence "has proved invaluable in several sensitive
nonterrorism investigations," including [...] an investigation into a
computer hacker who stole a company's trade secrets[.]
Justice Department officials said the cases cited in the report
represent only a small sampling of the many hundreds of nonterrorism
cases pursued under the law." -jlh
---
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/politics/28LEGA.html
U.S. Uses Terror Law to Pursue Crimes From Drugs to Swindling
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 -- The Bush administration, which calls the USA
Patriot Act perhaps its most essential tool in fighting terrorists,
has begun using the law with increasing frequency in many criminal
investigations that have little or no connection to terrorism.
The government is using its expanded authority under the far-reaching
law to investigate suspected drug traffickers, white-collar criminals,
blackmailers, child pornographers, money launderers, spies and even
corrupt foreign leaders, federal officials said.
Justice Department officials say they are simply using all the tools
now available to them to pursue criminals terrorists or otherwise.
But critics of the administration's antiterrorism tactics assert that
such use of the law is evidence the administration has sold the
American public a qi y28legabill of goods, using terrorism as a guise
to pursue a broader law enforcement agenda.
Justice Department officials point out that they have employed their
newfound powers in many instances against suspected terrorists. With
the new law breaking down the wall between intelligence and criminal
investigations, the Justice Department in February was able to bring
terrorism-related charges against a Florida professor, for example,
and it has used its expanded surveillance powers to move against
several suspected terrorist cells.
But a new Justice Department report, given to members of Congress this
month, also cites more than a dozen cases that are not directly
related to terrorism in which federal authorities have used their
expanded power to investigate individuals, initiate wiretaps and other
surveillance, or seize millions in tainted assets.
For instance, the ability to secure nationwide warrants to obtain
e-mail and electronic evidence "has proved invaluable in several
sensitive nonterrorism investigations," including the tracking of an
unidentified fugitive and an investigation into a computer hacker who
stole a company's trade secrets, the report said.
Justice Department officials said the cases cited in the report
represent only a small sampling of the many hundreds of nonterrorism
cases pursued under the law.
The authorities have also used toughened penalties under the law to
press charges against a lovesick 20-year-old woman from Orange County,
Calif., who planted threatening notes aboard a Hawaii-bound cruise
ship she was traveling on with her family in May. The woman, who said
she made the threats to try to return home to her boyfriend, was
sentenced this week to two years in federal prison because of a
provision in the Patriot Act on the threat of terrorism against mass
transportation systems.
And officials said they had used their expanded authority to track
private Internet communications in order to investigate a major drug
distributor, a four-time killer, an identity thief and a fugitive who
fled on the eve of trial by using a fake passport.
In one case, an e-mail provider disclosed information that allowed
federal authorities to apprehend two suspects who had threatened to
kill executives at a foreign corporation unless they were paid a hefty
ransom, officials said. Previously, they said, gray areas in the law
made it difficult to get such global Internet and computer data.
The law passed by Congress just five weeks after the terror attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, has proved a particularly powerful tool in pursuing
financial crimes.
Officials with the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have
seen a sharp spike in investigations as a result of their expanded
powers, officials said in interviews.
A senior official said investigators in the last two years had seized
about $35 million at American borders in undeclared cash, checks and
currency being smuggled out of the country. That was a significant
increase over the past few years, the official said. While the
authorities say they suspect that large amounts of the smuggled cash
may have been intended to finance Middle Eastern terrorists, much of
it involved drug smuggling, corporate fraud and other crimes not
directly related to terrorism.
The terrorism law allows the authorities to investigate cash smuggling
cases more aggressively and to seek stiffer penalties by elevating
them from what had been mere reporting failures.
Customs officials say they have used their expanded authority to open
at least nine investigations into Latin American officials suspected
of laundering money in the United States, and to seize millions of
dollars from overseas bank accounts in many cases unrelated to
terrorism.
In one instance, agents citing the new law seized $1.7 million from
United States bank accounts that were linked to a former Illinois
investor who fled to Belize after he was accused of bilking clients
out of millions, federal officials said.
Publicly, Attorney General John Ashcroft and senior Justice Department
officials have portrayed their expanded power almost exclusively as a
means of fighting terrorists, with little or no mention of other
criminal uses.
"We have used these tools to prevent terrorists from unleashing more
death and destruction on our soil," Mr. Ashcroft said last month in a
speech in Washington, one of more than two dozen he has given in
defense of the law, which has come under growing attack. "We have used
these tools to save innocent American lives."
Internally, however, Justice Department officials have emphasized a
much broader mandate.
A guide to a Justice Department employee seminar last year on
financial crimes, for instance, said: "We all know that the USA
Patriot Act provided weapons for the war on terrorism. But do you know
how it affects the war on crime as well?"
Elliot Mincberg, legal director for People for the American Way, a
liberal group that has been critical of Mr. Ashcroft, said the Justice
Department's public assertions had struck him as misleading and
perhaps dishonest.
"What the Justice Department has really done," he said, "is to get
things put into the law that have been on prosecutors' wish lists for
years. They've used terrorism as a guise to expand law enforcement
powers in areas that are totally unrelated to terrorism."
A study in January by the General Accounting Office, the investigative
arm of Congress, concluded that while the number of terrorism
investigations at the Justice Department soared after the Sept. 11
attacks, 75 percent of the convictions that the department classified
as "international terrorism" were wrongly labeled. Many dealt with
more common crimes like document forgery.
The terrorism law has already drawn sharp opposition from those who
believe it gives the government too much power to intrude on people's
privacy in pursuit of terrorists.
Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties
Union, said, "Once the American public understands that many of the
powers granted to the federal government apply to much more than just
terrorism, I think the opposition will gain momentum."
Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the
Judiciary Committee, said members of Congress expected some of the new
powers granted to law enforcement to be used for nonterrorism
investigations. But he said the Justice Department's secrecy and lack
of cooperation in putting the legislation into effect made him
question whether "the government is taking shortcuts around the
criminal laws" by invoking intelligence powers with differing
standards of evidence to conduct surveillance operations and demand
access to records.
"We did not intend for the government to shed the traditional tools of
criminal investigation, such as grand jury subpoenas governed by
well-established precedent and wiretaps strictly monitored" by federal
judges, he said.
Justice Department officials say such criticism has not deterred them.
"There are many provisions in the Patriot Act that can be used in the
general criminal law," Mark Corallo, a department spokesman, said.
"And I think any reasonable person would agree that we have an
obligation to do everything we can to protect the lives and liberties
of Americans from attack, whether it's from terrorists or
garden-variety criminals."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is
distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving the included information for research and
educational purposes.)
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Joseph Lorenzo Hall
Graduate Student http://pobox.com/~joehall